Image Credit: Toronto Film Festival
Ah, Marilyn Monroe! Deep down, we know that we don’t know her, not really, yet we also think that we know everything about her. We certainly believe that we know who she was on-screen: the bubblehead bombshell, the flirt angel who wiggled and cooed and batted her Bambi eyelashes, who turned sex into pure sugar. And off-screen, we have that whole tabloid sense of Marilyn, of her lousy childhood and her crumbled marriages and her off-the-set breakdowns and her on-the-set diva tantrums and, ultimately, her self-destruction. Her death by an overdose of pills was sort of like the death of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: To ask whether or not it was a suicide is to miss the point, for whether Marilyn killed herself on purpose or “accidentally,” it was more or less the same act of giving up on life. (And no, she wasn’t murdered. But since she died one year before her lover Jack Kennedy, maybe the notion that she was murdered can count as an even earlier media-age conspiracy theory.) READ FULL STORY »
